The speed at which you can update and deploy changes to your website to meet business needs has a direct impact on your company’s ability to stay agile. Here are three ways to streamline your work to grease the wheels.

Processes

How does a thought or an insight in a meeting turn into content on your site? The more defined your process for this, the faster you can make it happen.

Having processes for your website content and features may seem like a no brainer but usually when asked to describe this process most cannot point to a specific document or flow that they use. They might point to Slack messages, Google docs and spreadsheets rather than dedicated project and task management software.

Keep a process document and refer to it and update it often. It should contain all the info you internal team needs to make anything from a blog post to brand new section of your site.

Investing in collaboration tools like Asana, Monday or Trello can centralize discussions and content instead of having it spread across email, Slack, and Google docs.

Define who must be involved in the process early. Leaving out key people can mean that early work might need to be redone when stakeholders are brought in late. Which leads me to my next point.

Approvals

Don’t wait to determine who and when approvals are needed. Everyone wants to show initiative and save time by doing rough drafts and placeholder graphics but this can often lead to wasted effort.

Your process doc should clearly spell out who and what needs approval and when. Get incremental approvals instead of one big approval at the end. This means no surprises and no missed communication.

Incremental Releases

It is often said that “Good is the enemy of great” but it also more frequently true that “Great is the enemy of done.”

Embrace the idea that you will “Always be building”. Rather than deploying giant updates infrequently, work on getting things up faster and iterating on them to hone your message and presentation. The side benefit of this is that bugs and problems can be found sooner.

Incremental releases means that a version 1 may not have everything that was envisioned at the outset but it will usually get done in a fraction of the time and cost.